Jan 31, 2012

The San Francisco melodrama of a Lefty supervisor who is accused of spousal abuse in front of his two-year-old son and threatening his wife against pursuing the case, who was about to take office as the sheriff, continues.

I have four things to report on this melodrama. First, an old girlfriend came on the scene to accuse the sheriff of abusing her.

Second, none of my lefty friends will pay attention to this melodrama despite their intense interest in the lives of J Lo, Angelina and Lindsay.

My only explanation is that the sheriff is a Democrat, active in forming the American Green Party, and Democrats hate to admit that they are people full of Sturm und Drang. Downright bad Democrats everywhere they look.

Third, a new e-mail has come forward with the abused wife complaining about earlier mistreatment of their child by the sheriff.

Lastly, it turns out that when the sheriff was first booked, he was forced to turn in three pistols that he kept in his home. This is the man who as supervisor was so anti-gun that San Francisco bars the sale of any guns or ammunition within city limits.

Do any of the words: mean, hate filled, paranoid, hypocrite seem to fit this Lefty?

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.

I come to this conclusion by simply looking at the social environments that generate commerce. These environments have very distinct characteristics. The first is that commerce thrives in the society with the greatest social diversity. That means an immigrant society and an urban area.

Commerce thrives on meritocracy and honesty. Societies that reward meritocracy and honesty in the social milieu, ignoring or over riding class and social structure, are the ones that have long-term thriving commerce.

While many societies love technology and some favor open markets, these two propensities in the population can drive significant commercial vigor.

It is my unique understanding of commerce that allows me to see that commerce promotes individual authenticity. A society that promotes individualism, recognition of individual merit and freedom of individuals to develop their own authentic qualities is the society that will thrive and support commerce energetically.

Jan 29, 2012

I love the fact that these two acronyms can both be Googled. SOTU is the state of the union and SCOTUS is the Supreme Court.

I was googling this subject because president Obama deliberately and consciously insulted the Supreme Court in his 2010 state of the union address. He made false and dishonest statements about the Citizens United court decision.

At the time I was particularly offended because it was rude and showed a president who was insensitive to the design of the US Constitution and the debates about its creation as well as the 200 year history of our country.

As it turns out, the Chief Justice and the most important swing justice continued to attend the SOTU in 2011 and 2012. These men are obviously of greater character and historical importance than our rude, childish president.

From reading this Wall StreetJournal article it is clear that in 2010 the Court was trying to create a new pattern of good attendance at SOTU. That attempt at creating a new relationship with the Congress and executive branch was aborted by president Obama.

There is nothing much I can say on this subject other than my feelings that Americans would benefit by understanding the relationship between the three branches of government and our constitutional genius. President Obama is doing enormous damage to our country and this is relatively minor.

Jan 28, 2012

Since I have been thinking about the creation of new businesses I am reminded that the new business start up people I dealt with in India felt that the appropriate God for new businesses was Ganesh, the God of improvement. Improvement?

In India, the core worldview is of recycling life again and again in perpetual cycles.

In our European tradition, the past was an elevated period, the present is a diminished and declining era. In Europe the peak of civilization was 1914.

I have identified boundless optimism as a key ingredient in new business startups. I realize that the Indian improvement is somewhat similar to the American boundless optimism.

But in fact it is not. Boundless optimism projects a significant improvement in life in coming decades. Improvement only suggests that the current cycle may end up at a higher point than earlier cycles.

I am renewed in my view and my experience that boundless optimism is a key ingredient that makes American and Israeli startups so unique.

Jan 27, 2012

In 1984 I published a book called Baby Boom 2. The ebook is available here for a dollar.

In the book, I showed that there was a baby boom after the Civil War. While the Civil War was very short, the non-immigrant population jumped 48% from before the war until afterwards. The non-immigrant population from before WWII to afterwards jumped 47%.

As I show in the book, each baby-boom created entire new industries including food, clothes, music, retail and a wide range of technological developments.

The thirty year period of economic growth after the first and second baby-booms reached maturity were significant.

Growth from 1895 to 1925 was great. The growth from 1975 to 2005 was similarly great. Both periods saw extraordinary expansion of technology. In one era it was telephones, electricity and automobiles. In the second baby boom era it was computers, international trade and cell phones.

I can't help suspecting that baby booms generate extraordinary economic growth. They create a population with cohesion and optimism. Two vital elements for starting new businesses and subsequently new industries.

I know personally that my role in helping hundreds of World War II baby boomers to create businesses was possible because of their peer group coherence and incomparable optimism.

I don't see much of that outside of San Francisco, today. Most people are completing college, which the leading edge baby boomers rejected, and beginning adult life with significant loan burdens. Certainly I don't see the level of optimism that I saw from 1965 to 1985.

Could our current malaise simply be the absence of powerful new businesses and technology that come from a baby-boom?

Jan 26, 2012

If you follow the real estate market you will have noticed that office space is getting cheaper and office buildings face a declining market.

This is the result of the new kinds of employees.

I have been to many start-ups. They prefer open loft space for two reasons.

First, they like working without walls or glass barriers in large spaces with plenty of light, high ceilings and a sense of informality. It is this loft space quality that supports informality.

The second reason is that informality is supported by the clothing of the employees who would be uncomfortable entering an office building and most significantly many of these informal employees bring their dogs to work. That won't work in a standard office building.

Fortunately, the economics in San Francisco work out such that office space that sells for $250 a square foot can sell for $800 a square foot as residential downtown space. Modification from office to residential can be done for less than $200 a square foot.

So office space is being converted to downtown condominiums while warehouses are converted to offices.

Jan 24, 2012

The site is being effectively used to help friends and family schedule support volunteers for patients, keep visitors scheduled in a reasonable volume and sequence and most importantly to provide regular updates on the medical situation.

I am very impressed with the site and very impressed with this service. Before you use it make sure you know the correct name and spelling and website location for the patient you are concerned about.

Jan 23, 2012

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.

10. There are three distinctly different kinds of commerce. Since I have been giving advice for half a century to thousands of businesses it is obvious to me.

The three kinds of business are: trade, industry and clientry.

Trade is universal on the planet. It is the sale of cigarettes between prisoners. It is the flower shop where the owner goes to the flower Mart every morning. It is also Mitsui and Itochu with hundreds of billions of dollars trading lumber for coal for pork. Trade is always designed so that each single sale provides enough net revenue to replace the product sold and survive to the next sale.

Industry is what has changed the world over the past two centuries. An industrial business is designed to lower costs. Costs can be lowered in many ways ranging from the most important, achieving economies of scale, to implementing technological innovation, to applying marketing ingenuity. A local business, Lowes, can be part of a large industrial company.

Clientric businesses have one objective: to maintain a lifetime relationship with the customer. Such a clientric business could be a dentist, a graphic artist, a lawyer and it can also be a large firm like an investment counselor or an international bank.

Each of these three forms of business operates differently because the objectives are different.

Jan 22, 2012

There are two issues that are more important to San Franciscans than any anything including the economy or Victorian houses: spousal abuse and a hit-and-run involving a dog especially a Golden lab retriever. The second hasn’t happened but the first happened and will be front page news for several months.

One of the most liberal supervisors, in San Francisco that makes Lenin look conservative, was about to lose his position because of term limits. He ran for sheriff, an elective office, and the two police supported candidates split their votes. So the extreme liberal was elected sheriff.

A few days after New Year’s the sheriff's wife complained to a neighbor that her husband, the new sheriff, had abused her in front of her two-year-old son and threatened to take the son away in a custody battle because her husband is so politically powerful. That turned into three demeanor charges: spousal abuse, child endangerment and threatening a witness.

At this point the melodrama escalated. The new Sheriff claimed protection from prosecution because the issue was a private family matter. San Franciscans think that plea is nonsense.

The woman who heard the complaint from the sheriff’s wife happened to be a feminist radical with a law degree who videotaped the bruise on the wife’s arm as well as the conversation and the wife's description of an earlier beating. She reported the abuse.

When taken in to be charged at the main police station, the booking photo has the sheriff with his eyes closed. Every San Franciscan wants to know why. We’ve never seen such a mug shot.

The newly elected District Atty. knows the politics of San Francisco and brought three misdemeanor charges against the Sheriff. The DA also put a restraining order in place to keep the sheriff away from his wife and son.

The melodrama now escalated again. The sheriff’s wife, who was a melodrama star on Venezuelan TV, told a press conference that it was America and dirty politics that were tearing her family apart. (Such charges might actually be true in Venezuela.)

The Sheriff’s name is Ross Mirkarimi in case you want to follow this story. Mirkarimi is a Persian name.(Good newspaper version of the story.)

Jan 21, 2012

I am alarmed at the amount and nature of the advertising done in the past month by St. Jude hospital. St. Jude is in Memphis.

I worked with the Las Vegas Mafia in the late 1970s on a possible professional bingo game. I learned two things from the Mafia man I worked with. The first is that the Mafia will not harm you if you are honest and cooperative with them, second they laundered some of their money through St. Jude's hospital.

I have no idea what the relationship was nor whether it still exists. I don't recognize a single name on the various boards of St. Jude but that is not a reliable measure of any connection to or lack of connection to the Las Vegas Mafia.

What disturbs me most about the St. Jude TV advertising is the clear suggestion that St. Jude played a major role in finding a successful treatment for acute childhood leukemia (ALL).

The discovery of a successful treatment occurred over several decades and in many different institutions. The Nobel Prize went to two physiologists who did their work at Canberra (one of whom is now at St. Jude) in the 70s. Much of the transplant work that created the medical success was done at Stanford Univ. Hospital and in the VA system.

Frankly I am uncomfortable with what I know about St. Jude and their heavy TV fund raising.

Jan 20, 2012

I want to nominate the person I consider the most important man in the 20th century.

My nomination is based on two factors, two discounts. First I discount great men or leaders whose movement would have arisen or succeeded without them: Gandhi and ML King Jr. Then there are men who were in the right place at the right time: Churchill and Ronald Reagan.

My nomination is Ed Roberts. Ed Roberts was stricken with polio at age 14. He went on found the world disability movement. He matriculated at Berkeley and became the Director of the California Department of Vocational Rehab. Everything Ed did was a first.

Ed was a driving bull. What he did, he could have done anywhere in almost any time. Ed succeeded for two reasons: he was a man of such depth and integrity that everyone responded to him with love and hope.... He asked that the appreciation for him be bestowed on everyone else with disabilities. ( I wrote an obit on this subject.)

The disability movement has changed the way we all live from curb cuts, to accessibility in public facilities, to the perceptions we have about disability and birth defects. We were all made more human by Ed.

I do not mean to diminish the contributions of Judy Heuman and Joan Leon. They know that I appreciate them and they know the role that Ed played.

Jan 19, 2012

I am regularly disappointed by the data the Left and the Occupy Wall Street gang present on income and taxes. Journalistic fact-finders don't do much better.

The top 1% of American tax filers comprise 1.4 million people. Their income is over $350,000 (including capital gains). They get 17% of all American income and they pay 37% of all American personal income tax.

The top .1% comprise 140,000 people, all of whom have incomes over $1.5 million (including capital gains). They earn 8% of American personal income and they pay 17% of American income taxes.

From a rough estimate of the occupations listed on tax returns, somewhere between 20 and 25% of the top income bracket own or manage their own non-public company. For me this is a rough (minimum) estimate of the job creators in America.

Tax them unreasonably, as several states do, and watch them leave with their businesses. Apply higher national income taxes and watched them find ways around it.

San Francisco has a measly 1.5% payroll tax. Unique in California. Consequence: of over 100 significant businesses that have been started in San Francisco in the past hundred years (and survived) nearly everyone of them has left the city. Live with that fact, Democrat tax-and-spenders.

Jan 18, 2012

Somehow the world of Lefties has put nationalism in a dog house and promoted internationalism as a virtue.

Those of us who can look clearly at the United Nations and the European Union can see what a convoluted and erroneous idea the Left has.

In fact, the 20th century, was the first period in which nationalism emerged as a viable idea. We have to remember that the 19th century was an era of empires and frequent civil wars. The 20th century saw an end to most empires and the failure of the gigantic USSR.

In the 21st century we are beginning to see international stability as the nation-state is increasingly recognized for its coherence and vitality.

There is much to be learned about nationalism. We have no clear definition but we are coming to understand what nationalism is. As I have mentioned before, the nation-state of Israel is doing the most to teach us what nationalism is.

Israel is teaching us that the nation has as much or more right to self-defense than an individual. Israel is teaching us that a religion, a history, an ethnic bond and a language can be the foundation for a nation. The United States has already taught us that a founding document can be the basis for a nation.

When Israel no longer is expected to absorb people who abandoned it or were defeated in a war, nor to give back land that was militarily won.... A great deal more will be understood about a nation.

More than anything, the failure of the UN, the EU and several artificial Arab and African states will help further explicate the superior status of nationhood in the 21st century.

Jan 17, 2012

Every January in San Francisco there is a giant bonfire on the beach as described in this newspaper article.

I started this in 1978. It wasn't my idea. The idea came from my girlfriend, Carole Rae, who saw many Christmas trees on the street and came up with the idea that we should burn them on the beach in a great bonfire.

We picked a Saturday in early January, when there was no wind. My stepmother (Lou Phillips) and my son and I drove a rental truck around the neighborhood and filled it with 40 large abandoned Christmas trees. Carole phoned our friends to tell them what time and place to be at the beach.

Over 200 friends came to the first beach bonfire. We unloaded the truck and had a wonderful time. Many influential politicians and business leaders came.

The second year we did it, I walked back the truck and found a Park Ranger who gave me a $15 ticket for starting the bonfire without a permit.

One of my former friends, a lawyer (Gary N.) insisted we fight the ticket. Under great social pressure I agreed. The trial was before a judge I knew. She waved the ticket fee but made me promise never to start a bonfire again. The worst possible outcome.

The third year, I hid the truck after we unloaded it. The crowd was even bigger.

Jan 16, 2012

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.

9. Social Thought is an all encompassing world view. All institutions including language are organized around ideas, concepts, images or metaphors.

The first use of this term was by the University of Chicago for its Committee on Social Thought. The Committee began after the Second World War. Its use of the term Social Thought referred to the core Greek ideas that shape the modern world. My use of the term is broader than the University's Committee.

My use of the term originated from reading Mary Douglas's book How Institutions Think. Prof. Douglas is the mother of the idea. My role was to clearly identify the concept and to promote it in intellectual circles.

I began my national public radio program, Social Thought, that covered 40 stations nationwide and the armed services network, in 1988. The program ran for nine years. The list of the program guests is here.

My relationship to the idea of Social Thought is to have recognized it, named it, exemplified the breadth of it and promoted its vital function in intellectual and academic circles.

To quickly understand Social Thought think of the invisible hand of the market, that is a metaphor that organizes economic thinking. Think of the metaphor for the term 'over' which has a common image when referring to over the bridge, the movie is over, the ideas are over his head and the bank balance is over drawn.

We structure our world on metaphors, ideas, images and concepts. The mechanisms for the human mind and our common behavior is social thought.

Jan 14, 2012

There is a great deal of speculation in the financial community about the impact of the impending Euro failure.

This is unfortunate. There is one cause and that is the failure of our government and our financial advisers to understand very simple advice I have been offering on this blog for three years.

The financial system is inherently volatile. Human genius will always create brilliant new financial instruments. Over a dozen have been created since 1980. Each of these new financial instruments will have perverse unexpected consequences and there will be an interaction of unexpected consequences over time. Nothing can be done to suppress this genius.

The most preposterous attempt is to have government regulation. Government regulators begin with the inherent incompetence of bureaucracy and the blindness of status quo.

The solution is to buffer the financial world from the commercial world. This is done by making sure that banks, the prime regulated entity, are not allowed to withdraw their loan funds from businesses unless the underlying assets have declined. I call this institution the Federal Loan Insurance Corporation.

Right now Wells Fargo is calling in lines of credit in Southern California because their asset base must be raised in the year 2012. Exactly the perverse consequence I am talking about. Wells will severely depress commercial activity in Southern California because of poor banking regulations and the absence of an FLIC.

Jan 13, 2012

I have been reading Torah recently. There is little doubt that the Torah has a God in mind. I think of that God as a literary God.

It is important to have some conception of this literary God because the translations of Hebrew, Torah and Christian stories are built into our English language, our metaphors and our Western conceptual world.

One of the most powerful elements of this literary God is something that former president Jimmy Carter figured out... he punishes the enemies of the Jews.

Another element that this literary God makes clear, and president Obama never learned because his minister of 20 years was a Jew hater, is that Jerusalem is the sacred city built by and for Jews.

It strikes me that literary narratives have very strong influence on the way humans think.

Whether there is or is not a God, even in Spinoza's sense, it must be that the literary narrative has an effect in the world .... wherever Western traditions have an influence.

Jan 12, 2012

There is some good news in the world of schooling that we seldom remember.

Certainly most teachers are cramming their left wing environmental ideology down the throats of K to 12 public school students. The reports and stories of this disgrace are endless.

If this were indeed the future, it would not be pleasant. However there have been two phenomenon working against this misfortune.

One is the migration of whites and Latinos to private schools because of the integration of public schools with belligerent ghetto kids who are not controlled by the public schools. The second is the stunning growth in homeschooling.

There are about 50 million kids in K-12 at any one point. Roughly 15 million of these are in private schools or are part of the 2 million beinghome schooled.

Many states now provide supervision for the non-public school world, including testing of grade level.

I'm sure that many parents in the homeschooling world and in the private school world are Lefty fundamentalists and environmental fanatics but from my experience, the proportion is much lower than in public schools. In addition private schools and almost always homeschooling provides many lessons via the Internet. The Internet offers far greater diversity of opinions and data than the Lefty world would approve of.

So there is some hope in the modern landscape of schooling for future adults who are independent thinkers who will appreciate America

Jan 11, 2012

San Francisco is increasingly a city where people work alone, are self-employed or do contract work.

My guess is that these people now constitute a quarter of the 800,000 person city workforce.

The most visible consequence for me is in the peculiarity of traffic. Some days traffic that was well designed to flow in one direction in morning or evening is severely blocked because of cross traffic.

Cross traffic is the movement of the ‘new worker,’ the alone - sole proprietor - contract worker going to a meeting, a residential workplace or an errand that has nothing to do with the salaried workers' main street traffic.

The opposite phenomenon occurs in and around holidays. All traffic seems to disappear. This is because the alone – sole proprietor – contract worker seems able to take more complete holidays than the salary worker. Four or five days near a weekend instead of one. This may be due to the ability of the alone – sole proprietor – contract worker to take their work with them or because they know how desperately they need vacation time.

Jan 10, 2012

I don't know and nobody knows whether the Tea Party continues to have the vigor that brought it such great success in 2010.

The reason that the subject is highly relevant right now is because president Obama has trampled on democratic mechanisms by making four interim appointments while the Senate was still in session.

The Democratic Party babble is that George W Bush did the same thing. Not true. Bush made interim appointments when Congress was not in session. By agreement, when the session was still technically convened Bush did not make appointments.

The real question is whether this distinction about congressional recess and the Senate being technically still in session can be clearly explained to the Tea Party public.

If it can we have a new source of Tea Party vitality.

Only those people, such as myself, who understand Tea Party values can see the relevance of this issue. The Tea Party became the most significant political movement in the history of the world when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid used an arcane Congressional budget mechanism to pass the most massive legislation in American history.

It was that single undemocratic maneuver that brought the Tea Party to life. If the recess session issue can be made understandable that will revitalize the Tea Party. If not, this president is certain to make some future anti-democratic maneuver.

Jan 09, 2012

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.

8. In a voluntary society, most of the things we do are the result of social sorting.

Social sorting explains where you live, where you work, what organizations you belong to, what media you pay attention to, who your friends are and pretty much what happens to you during your life.

Social sorting has three components: the flag, the screen and the overflow.

The flag is what attracts you to each institution. Sometimes the flag is obvious and a strong draw, such as the desire to become like a friend of yours who is a captain in the Air Force. Sometimes it is merely the PTA of the school your second child goes to. Often where we work is based on what we know about the company or the field of work.

The screen is what allows us to become a member of the institution. Sometimes it is very strong such as getting through the employment interviews or passing the New York State bar examination. Sometimes the screen is unnoticeable such as attending a baseball game or registering to vote in the Green Party. Buying a particular house may only require good credit or being blind to the hazards of living near a high school.

The overflow is the final determinant of your membership or participation in any institution. At work, the day comes when you know you are not appreciated or you don't belong and you quit. In a membership organization, you just know that time has gone by and you have made few friends so you leave. You just stop going to a particular coffee shop and don't really know why, it just doesn't feel right any more.

Nearly all of our choices and accommodations in life are the result of these three mechanisms in social sorting.

A full description of social sorting can be found in my book Gods of Commerce published in 1997...... beginning on page 34.

Jan 08, 2012

Politics always seems to stimulate my blog readership. By politics I mean the function of life in the political world.

If you are not in politics you are unlikely to understand what I say here. You can make a note of what I said, but it won't ring true.

Politics is mastering the art of getting other people by the balls. In politics the phrase is not 'by the balls' it is 'by the short hairs' .... I interpret this to mean pubic hair. Lyndon Johnson was known in Washington as the master of ‘short hairs’.

What it means is that every person in politics has something they want desperately and something they want kept very secret. You have someone by the balls when their political choice must be determined by your use of leverage on them either by appealing to their desires or their terror. A politician is a person for whom many people have their desires available as leverage and many people leverage their terror as well.

Of course I know this sounds strange and maybe preposterous. But what is most evident is that the longer people are in a new role, speaker or president, the fewer actions they take and the more cautious is their behavior. This is because as time goes by there are more people who have the politician by the balls and are pulling in opposite, painful, directions.

Enough. If you are in politics you know how painfully true this description is. If you are not it must sound ridiculous.

In the corporate world there is some similar phenomena, but in most cases managers are forced to choose between many very similar options with dissimilar outcomes. Not desires and terrors. Too many things look like a 5.1 or 5.2 or 5.3 choice but one has a 7.6 outcome while another has a 4.9 outcome. Business is much more a matter of carefully graduated choices and much less an emotionally painful balancing of desire and terror.

Jan 07, 2012

At the party of friends I was asked to explain my simple living. I had to refuse because my reasons for simple living cannot be proselytized.

I chose simple living in order to give myself maximum freedom. Having few obsessions and even fewer 'wants' allows me to earn or not earn in whatever activity I pursue.

That freedom is only possible and desirable to someone who can live with great ambiguity as well as complete comfort in one's own identity.

There are too few people who are comfortable with ambiguity and still fewer who are completely comfortable in their identity. That cannot be proselytized.

Since I do not know how to teach or guide other people in these directions, I certainly would not throw them into the briarpatch of simple living.

To me simple living is never pure austerity, deprivation or righteousness. Simple living means reducing possessions and wants to the level in which they minimize the time for maintenance, the worries about loss or the need to store them.

A simple liver can have expensive objects, art or highly specialized tools so long as everything meets the criteria in the previous sentence.

Jan 06, 2012

Another few hours spent waiting for a plane to San Francisco because of weather conditions that limited landings to one runway. There are two runways in San Francisco but they are too close together for landings in marginal visibility.

The solution is a new runway which would dramatically increase the number of jobs and wealth of the Bay Area. The environmental movement is so strong in the Bay Area that no landfill is permitted. No new runway looks feasible as a consequence.

While waiting I talked to a number of people, including the captain of our flight. Everyone seemed to understand that our distress was caused by the environmental movement.

I see a solution. The Airport Commission should vote to build a floating runway. This would not be subject to the environmentalists fanaticism. It would be governed by Coast Guard regulations. Most of the time the floating runway would be sitting on the muddy Bay floor.

Jan 05, 2012

A different lesson can be drawn from the same material in the last blog.Even though the United States had a superior satellite spy system observing the USSR and China, the United States had completely inadequate intelligence about the military direction of the USSR and the nature of its economic output.

By the beginning of the '80s it was necessary to re-examine the Russian military intention and purpose because the satellite data and the human spy material were in conflict. After the Cold War was over it turned out that the fundamental premise of American policy, mutually assured destruction, was not in sync with USSR policy. We never understood communist intent and purpose.

Having good images is almost irrelevant when you need to know intent and purpose. The same was true of the fall of the USSR where the US did not understand the extent of the economic failure. We missed the collapse of communism in the USSR and didn't get it right in China either.

I compare the knowledge of images without intent and purpose to neurobiology which I consider to be mostly irrelevant. Knowing what parts of the brain light up is not important to knowing how the brain actually functions. Lighting up is not the same thing as processing and says nothing about what is going on.

A map of a city bus route and time schedule tells you little or nothing about the quality or functioning of the bus service.

Jan 04, 2012

Here is the wonderful story of the secret project to build better and better surveillance satellites and the secrecy associated with it.

To me there is a management lesson in this news story.

The management lesson is that people work harder and better when the intent and purpose of their work is elevated. The people in this secret project were committed, highly imaginative, dedicated and cooperative in an extreme, because their work was clearly connected to an intent and purpose they supported. Protecting the United States from two major communist countries.

I think this is true in almost all situations. It is important for the intent and purpose of work to be effectively communicated and to have an elevated reason inherent in it.

Elevated reasons are found in new products, service to humans, intense appreciation of the work, public benefit, good Samaritan motives, sheer excitement and many others. People work hard for elevated reasons and those reasons must be communicated frequently and effectively.

Jan 03, 2012

I recently read a short article in Commentary (by George Russell) that reminded me of Jim Jones. Jim Jones of Jonestown and the mass suicide of 909 followers in 1978.

I knew Jim Jones and worked with him on occasion. I do not know Barack Obama but the parallels are horrifying.

Jim was a socialist whose church sermons, sound to me, very much like Obama’s Chicago church of Jeremiah Wright. Jim claimed to be half black. Jim was a master of politics in San Francisco and was welcomed and supported by every prominent politician and public figure. The press adored him. Sound familiar.

Jim was somewhat paranoid and became much more so when a small local magazine article finally exposed the bizarre side of him. (I advised him to ignore it...he ignored me and fought back). I never saw his mean or cruel side but I know he was deeply committed to his socialist values and the communal ideas of communism. He moved his large church to the commune in Leftist Guyanna. He hated the rich and excoriated them regularly. All his church members gave their savings to the church.Obama has always promoted his own socialist views. Obama clearly has a mean streak. He sent back the gift bust of Winston Churchill the first week he was in office. He scared the weak and elderly in July of 2011 with his imaginary threat to cut off Social Security checks. He went out of his way to try and start a class war and hasn’t stopped in the past five months. (Obama always attacks the ‘millionaires and billionaires, Wall Street, hedge fund managers and people who fly in private jets’.)

Obama, like the occupy movement he created, has been treated with deference and worship by the mainstream media. It is fair to use the Jim Jones metaphor that "the media has swallowed the Obama Kool-Aid".

Jim Jones enchanted the black community much like Obama. Both are like the Pied Piper of Hamlin for the black community.

The power of Jim Jones and his message have not been studied at all. I fear therefore that the parallels with Obama are so great that we may have Obama for a second term simply based on the parallels in charisma and our propensity to swallow Kool-Aid.

It is significant and not ironic that attacks on the blindness of the press and the Left as drinking ‘Obama’s Kool-aid’ are using the Kool-aid phrase directly coming from Jim Jones. The parallels are disturbing.

Jan 02, 2012

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.

7. Participatory design is a difficult concept to explain. It is not necessarily openness or transparency. It is rather the opposite of proprietary.

In my books and articles and lectures I have cited many examples. The first is the RCA 45 record player which was designed to be proprietary in operation and content. This is contrasted with the Philips tape cassette, which was openly licensed to everyone at a low cost. RCA was stuck with the teenybopper record market, very small. Philips got 1/3 of the gigantic participatory tape market that they created.

Polaroid got a teeny specialized market. 35mm film from Kodak and others fit in every camera with every type of lens and was the dominant film. RCA failed again with its proprietary video disk and proprietary content.

Apple has always been proprietary and rarely got 2% of the global PC market. In contrast, the apps on the iPhone were a stunning success because they were participatory in nature. The Android apps turned out to be even more participatory and more successful.

The lesson never changes. Go proprietary and you will have a smaller market than the participatory market will generate. The reason is simple: thousands of minds and innovators who work in the participatory mode can be more in touch with the market than dozens who work on the proprietary level.

Jan 01, 2012

The whole issue of mark to market, which is accounting speak for pricing the value of all loans and assets at the current market price rather than the price they went on the books at, is now being recognized as a source of the 2008 financial crisis.

I recognized this almost immediately for two reasons. First, a massive financial movement must require a systemic cause and an accounting change is systemic. Second, I have always considered the financial world to be highly volatile and understood that the sources of volatility can never be anticipated.

Here is a wonderful discussion of the issues of mark to market. If you are interested in this subject you will be interested in this debate. Frankly we have a case where openness and transparency can be in conflict with stability. I think we have gone a little too far in the transparency of assets direction.